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Immigrants and Prison

Near the start of his Nov. 4, 2003, program on CNN, Lou Dobbs said, “One-third of the inmates now serving time in federal prisons come from some other country — one-third.” Later, he offered more details: “Coming up, we’re going to take a further look at the impact of illegal aliens. And it is an expensive proposition, particularly in our nation’s prisons. Illegal aliens, those citizens — noncitizens taking up a third of the cells in our federal penitentiaries.”

He also said that illegal immigrants were “an increasing part of America’s prison population.”

¶In 2000, 27 percent of the inmates in federal prisons were noncitizens. Some of these noncitizens were illegal immigrants, and some were in this country legally. In 2001, this percentage dropped to 24 percent, and it continued dropping over the next four years, falling to 20 percent in 2005.

Bottom line: illegal immigrants make up significantly less than a third of the federal prison population, and the share has been falling in recent years.

¶The share of state prison inmates who are noncitizens is much lower. (This is largely because immigration violations themselves are federal crimes.) In 2000, 4.6 percent of inmates in state prisons were noncitizens. This number remained quite steady over the next five years, right around 4.6 percent.

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¶By comparison, 6.9 percent of the total United States population were noncitizens in 2003, according to the Census Bureau.

Anne Morrison Piehl, an economist at Rutgers, says there are a number of reasons that immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native-born population. (To read a paper by Ms. Piehl and Kristin Butcher on immigrants and crime, click here.)

For one thing, the consequences of being arrested can be enormous for illegal immigrants, which is an obvious deterrent to crime. For another, immigrants, as a group, aren’t typical of the population. The fact that they have picked up and moved to another country suggests that they have more ambition, and perhaps even more skill, than the average person. This could help explain why the United States, a nation of immigrants, is such an economic powerhouse.